Dublin City Council prefabs must be temporary

Dublin City Council prefabs must be temporary – Noone

Fine Gael Dublin Senator, Catherine Noone, has today responded to the proposal that the Sinn Fein-controlled Dublin City Council is “seriously looking at” using prefabricated housing in order to alleviate the homeless crisis as “a temporary solution and one which must not get in the way of a long-term fix”.

“Today, the Head of Housing in Dublin City Council, Dick Brady admitted that it is highly likely that the Council’s budget for housing homeless people in hotels will run over. In this instance, their accommodation is not fit for purpose, with no cooking facilities and shared rooms between families. It’s clear that more appropriate accommodation is urgently needed. However, it needs to be strongly emphasised that this prefabricated idea should only be considered as a temporary both for individual families, and for Dublin City as a proposed solution to the homeless crisis.

“I would feel far more comfortable about this proposal if we had some kind of a set target for relieving the scale and size of the homeless problem alongside it. It seems to me that shunting people from hotels to prefabricated structures, with no timelines in mind, is unwise. However, it is also clear that we need to do something to give a reasonable standard of accommodation to people who find themselves homeless, and that the hotels that are currently being used are in some cases not fit for this purpose.

“I hope that the Sinn Fein-controlled Dublin City Council can work to bring about solutions to this problem, starting with an increase in the amount of social housing provided, as this is an urgent problem which is waiting for a solution.”